Wandering Around Talking To Rainbows

So on my big to-do list for August, I had a lot of stuff, including 'do something touristy' as I don't really do much touristy with my days off. It is however, still tourist season in the Highlands, so weekends seemed a no-no. I have, however, been working Sundays lately so I get a TOIL day in return on Fridays so I planned to go visit a castle this Friday. (I re-newed my Historic Scotland card for going to Orkney so I'm trying to make it pay for itself - handily there are plenty of HS properties round here.) Then I actually looked at the weather forecast and lo, though the weather this week is gorgeous, Friday will be the exception - though actually its looking better than it was at the start of the week - so being on the backshift I decided to see where I could go one morning. So it turns out that I can get a bus from across the road directly to Urquhart Castle and that the times worked out to give me a good solid two hours to explore the place and still get back in time for work. Urquhart Castle is largely ruined and I was going early enough I should avoid the worst of the crowds it should be fine right?! Ha. No. Actually it turned out that two hours was a perfectly good timeframe to give myself. Just that, well if that was me 'avoiding the worst of the crowds' I hate to think what a Saturday afternoon in July is like. What I didn't realise is that Urquhart Castle is a MASSIVELY popular tourist attraction. All the foreign tourists in the queue with me were somewhere on a loop involving Edinburgh, Stirling and Urquhart castles. Clearly it is the 'Highland Castle' of choice. (Personally I would have thought Eilean Donan would be a more obvious choice - its more intact and picturesque - but logistically Urquhart Castle is easier to get to, especially if you're getting there under your own steam. Come to Edinburgh for the festival, couple of hours on the train to Inverness, half an hour on the bus to the castle, coulple of hours there, have dinner in town and back on the last train south, an easy day trip if you're used to bigger countries than this one...) I have never seen so many tourists in a castle, and that includes when I took my Aussie relatives round Stirling castle last August. I think part of the problem is that its not that big a castle. Well...it is that big a castle, it covers quite a large area but its mostly ruins, so the intact bits that you can get inside and wander around get extra choked up with people. It's weird. I mean, I know that the Highlands are massively popular with tourists, but I'm so used to puttering around castles on my own or as one of half-a-dozen people (dodging out of each other's photos and pointing out good shots to each other) that I was a bit overwhelmed by the sheer volume of people.

The other weird thing about the day was the moment when a military jet flew overhead at great speed accompanied by a stunned silence and the gentle clicking of cameras. It's easy to forget that there's an airbase at Lossiemouth - now the only operational RAF base in Scotland - just up the road (Possibly one of these? As apparently there are some based at Lossiemouth - they have Typhoons too but it looked more like this as it speeded overhead.) and it was a nice juxtoposition, I suppose, to see the old and the new in defense of the realm side by side for a moment.



Urquahart Castle from outside the walls.

A Trebuchet, why is it there? Well because some time ago a bunch of experts got together to recreate a trebuchet and test it out on the banks of the Loch. They built two (I think) and left one behind as a tourist attraction. Inside the visitor centre there are a pile of massive great boulders that they used to fire, that were found around the castle during restoration work.

The tower from the drawbridge

Over the bridge and through the gate

Gateway rubble, despite the focus on trebuchets, the gatehouse was actually blown up by its own guards. Unable to defend it from the encroaching Jacobite forces, they blew up the gatehouse and and left the castle to burn down, thus stopping their enemies using it as a stronghold.

The bridge over the moat.

Upstairs in the guardhouse

The other side of the gatehouse

This wasn't the original keep, the original keep was at the other end of the castle, but when it passed to the Grants, they had a new tower added on live in. Now it looks like one of those cutaway drawings of castles you get in history textbooks at school.

From this angle it looks rather more intact.

It's really not, from here you can see where one of the floors is no longer.

Turrets

All that remains of the great hall and associated buildings.

The Kitchens

The Outer Walls are mostly ruined


Lots of the ruins are intriguing and mysterious.

Sunny ruins

Across the castle.

The doocot and the original abandoned keep of the castle.

The original tower on its own, the oldest part of the castle and therefore most ruinous. The tourists don't get anywhere near this one.


No sign of the monster...maybe the jets scared her off?

The Garbeg Symbol Stone, all that remains of the first people believed to have lived on the site - its thought that the castle was built on the site of a Pictish fort. Incidentally the first reported incident of an encounter with the Loch's monster comes from around the period, that of the visit of St Columba to the Pictish King of the area.